14 DAY TRIAL // Though tablets and laptops, among other things, grabbed most of the spotlight at Computex during the first two days, they couldn't keep all the attention to themselves for long. Eventually, they had to make room on stage for the various motherboards, memory kits, graphics cards and other hardware that was put on display. For one, this let next-generation solid state drives, powered by the SATA 6.0Gbps interface, make themselves noticed.
SSDs are already known for being much faster than hard drives. Of course, the final performance depends on the SSD controller used. By means of the Marvell controller, A-Data was able to bring speeds all the way up to 350MB/s when reading and 200MB/s when writing. What's more, Plextor was able to achieve an even more noteworthy feat, namely 400MB/s and 200MB/s. The SATA III interface, however, while quite fast and intriguing, is still not exactly widespread, which makes SATA 3.0 Gbps more appealing to a larger consumer base. G.Skill knows this, which is why it brought out the Phoenix Pro.
The Phoneix Pro may not reach 350MB/s, but even on the SATA 3.0Gbps connection, it manages an impressive 285MB/s and 275MB/s when reading and writing, respectively. Such transfer rates are possible because of a custom firmware and the very popular SandForce SF-1200 SSD controller. Essentially the most widespread among solid state drives, this controller enables 4KB random writing performance of up to 50,000 IOPS. This comes in addition to TRIM support.
The G.Skill Phoenix Pro SSD is made out of MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips and will, at the very least, come in a 120GB version sometime this month, at least that's what Hexus reports. Of course, considering the growing popularity of SSDs, there is a high likelihood of 60GB and 240GB models also appearing, eventually.